Sabrina Losie was just 16 years old when diagnosed with ovarian cancer. Imagine that.
The Grade 11 Stelly’s student endured surgery, blood transfusions, an allergic reaction to chemo drugs, the whole horrible deal.
Then one day, a week before her chemotherapy ended, a knock came at the door. It was bus driver Barry George.
“He came to our house after work,” says Losie. “He was still in his Transit uniform.”
George had arrived on behalf of the Help Fill A Dream Foundation. You’re going to a concert in Seattle, going to meet Kelly Clarkson and Clay Aiken backstage, he told Losie.
Ten years later, she remembers it clearly. “To have something like that come at the end of a fairly tumultuous time, it meant so much,” says the now-26-year-old.
Losie was among dozens of people who surprised George at a Gorge Road bus stop Thursday as he drove his last run for B.C. Transit, 40 years to the day after he drove the first one. Appropriately, the crowd was a mix of friends from B.C. Transit and Help Fill a Dream, two organizations that have been inextricably linked for 28 years.
It was a transit driver who founded the Victoria-based charity in 1986. The cause has been embraced by Transit and the bus drivers’ union ever since. It has become part of the corporate culture, employees raising well over half a million dollars in the past decade alone. (At one point, the charity even got the spare change lost by bus passengers.) Transit workers have helped Help Fill A Dream provide 2,000 “dreams” — awesome experiences to Vancouver Island children with life-threatening illnesses, as well as financial assistance for their families.
The most popular dream remains a trip to Disneyland. Jeneece Edroff went there in 1997, then got to swim with dolphins in Florida in 2008. Help Fill A Dream has a room at Jeneece Place — the home away from home for families travelling to Victoria for their children’s hospital treatment — and paid for more than 400 room nights for families there in 2013. Jeneece, who turned 20 a couple of weeks ago, was among those meeting George at the bus stop Thursday.
Few have been as heavily invested in Help Fill A Dream as George, who was recruited by his friend and fellow driver Rick Thomas back at the beginning. Thomas and his wife set up the charity after Thomas met a seven-year-old bus passenger with a terminal illness. The girl really wanted to see her grandmother in Nova Scotia. The foundation made sure little Bernadette got to visit her grandma for the very first — and last — time.
George took over as board president after Thomas died of a heart attack in 1989. He has volunteered in a variety of roles ever since, living proof of what can be done when one to two people decide to make a difference.
He is known for more than that, though, as he has often been the public face of B.C. Transit when it came time to introduce new buses or to speak up on drivers’ issues. (Have you ever been on a bus when Santa Claus is patrolling the aisle? Guess who.)
George’s reason for signing on as a driver was pretty basic: “I needed a job.”
He was a starving third-year UVic student working on a degree in urban planning when he applied to B.C. Transit. Sorry, replied the human resources guy, you have too much education. George wrote back, told the HR guy Transit needed to change its policy. He got hired, began driving bus in 1974, and never left.
He’s a proud member of the million mile club, not a single preventable accident in the 33 years he spent behind the wheel before becoming a full-time trainer of other drivers seven years ago. He did mention one incident from his own training period, though: an elderly woman got her face trapped in the closing doors when she poked her head into the bus just before George was about to pull onto Douglas Street. With George fumbling for the controls to free her, she asked, “Can you tell me what time the No. 1 …”
At 64, he has a million funny stories of life on the road. Some you can print.
He’ll add another next month when he gets behind the wheel of a bus one more time, driving Losie’s guests to the rehearsal dinner prior to her wedding.
